“Where there is money, there is art fraud”: A Toronto filmmaker on his obsession with a $70-million painting scam

Canadian art collector, producer and documentarian Barry Avrich loves films that walk the line, and when he learned of a sprawling Manhattan art fraud conspiracy, he knew he’d found one. Between 1994 and 2011, New York gallery Knoedler and Company sold an estimated $70 million worth of counterfeit expressionist paintings, including purported never-before-seen works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. In 2020, Avrich’s documentary Made You Look introduced the cast of extremely educated characters who enabled (either intentionally or not) the elaborate art scheme. This month, Avrich will release a follow-up book, The Devil Wears Rothko, that digs further into the story. We chatted with the charismatic art lover about the differences between the camera and the pen, how to avoid being duped by a thing of beauty, and how he became enamoured with Ann Freedman, the woman at the centre of the scandal.

In the span of five years, you’ve made both a movie and a book on the same art scandal. Do you have a particular hang up with the art world? I grew up in Montreal, in a house filled with art. Though my parents weren’t wealthy, they collected what art that they could afford. My mother and I visited galleries constantly. My dad would often be on the road for his work, and he’d come back with these strange objects. Once, he returned with a piece of driftwood he found so beautiful, he hung it on the wall.

When I got older, I was introduced to another side of the art world by a friend who was a big-time collector. We’d often visit New York together. There, he had access to a world of art that was not seen by the general public. It had a very rarefied air to it. His kind of art had no prices. Unless you were a real player, no salesperson would even look at you. My world of art was one of subjectivity, but this was one where people bought pieces based on what their dealer told them, not what they were seeing with their own eyes.

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In the mid-’90s, Glafira Rosales, a Long Island art dealer who claimed to be representing an anonymous collector, walked into the Knoedler gallery claiming she’d come upon some extremely valuable never-before-seen paintings by notable abstract impressionist artists. In fact, they were actually made by Pei-Shen Qian, an amateur artist living in Queens. For 14 years, Rosales consigned the counterfeit paintings to Ann Freedman, the well-respected head of the gallery. What made you particularly obsessed with this case? The whole cast of characters. They were all irresistible. But, for me, Ann Freedman was the biggest get. She was the head of Knoedler and Company at the time of the scandal and ultimately fell on the sword for Michael Hammer, the owner of the gallery and heir to businessman Armand Hammer’s fortune.

Hammer was an unseemly kind of guy, with a deep tan, unruly bleach-blond hair and tattoos. He collected fancy sports cars and attended all kinds of fancy charity events, even while his gallery was going under. Ann, however, seemed like the real deal. She always had incredible charisma and an unbelievable passion for art and its ability to change lives. She moved very happily in a world that was utterly inaccessible to most, and even after making so many enemies, she made it quite clear that she was unwilling to leave it.

She didn’t keep a low profile in the art world—she still owns a gallery and goes to all the shows. She insists she knew nothing about the fraud even though one of the paintings she sold was a Pollock whose signature was misspelled right on the actual canvas. This was a woman so taken with her position that she couldn’t look at reality even if it punched her in the face.

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Freedman was never convicted, and in 2017 she settled the tenth and last lawsuit against her, from art buyer Domenico De Sole. How did you get her to open up to you? Getting her to speak with me was very much a matter of courtship and seduction. She brought bags full of evidence supporting her innocence, and I paid attention to every last detail. Once she was in, she was in. It was all about ego. She talked often about selling rights to a biopic version of the film. She knew I wasn’t going to vindicate her, but I promised to tell her story the way she wanted it told. I think that, for a woman who was once queen of New York, the feeling of somehow getting back there—one way or another—was what ultimately kept her in the film. After she watched it, she left me a voicemail that said, “Well, well, that was quite an editing job.” Then she hung up, and I never heard from her again.

Did you go into telling the story with your own opinion about Ann’s guilt? Ann is the most intriguing subject I’ve ever studied. I researched her heavily before we went into the interviews, and I was more than willing to be convinced of her innocence. She was certainly constantly trying to sell me on it, and she was indeed a good salesperson. We did 12 hours of taping with her, and after each break in the shoot days, my crew and I would debate and vacillate for hours on whether we felt she was being honest. If we went into making the movie with the goal of either vindicating or damning her, the movie would not have worked as well.

Why did you feel you needed to write a book after you had already made a movie based on the case? People weren’t really buying documentary series at the time, and I thought mine could be a three-parter. There was simply so much that didn’t make it in that I wanted to unpack. Plus it’s a story that keeps on giving. The world hasn’t learned anything from this massive fraud. More fakes are being discovered all the time. I wanted to write a book in a conversational tone from my perspective, so that even people who aren’t part of the art world could begin to understand a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes.

Which medium do you feel gets you closer to the truth of the story, the pen or the camera? I’ve made close to 70 documentaries, interviewing everyone from Mick Jagger to David Letterman. Whether there’s a camera there or not is moot. The only way an interview works is if the subject feels comfortable, and it’s my job to get them unselfconscious enough to spill and go deep. If I ask the right questions, don’t use notes and am engaged, suddenly a mogul who’s told me they only have ten minutes for me will be getting into the second hour of an interview. It’s definitely a gift I have to get people to talk to me.

Do you still believe the art world is magical, or has your work ruined it for you? It’s taught me that art has no inherent value. The raw elements—the paint, canvas, frame and wire—cost relatively little compared with the construction, materials, labour and hides of leather found in a Bentley. Art is the business of emotion and identity. What matters is how someone feels about it and what they think it says about them and their status as a collector. When galleries set prices, they’re banking on collectors’ emotions.

What tips would you give to amateur collectors looking to purchase art? Is provenance key? Frank Stella, the great American painter, told me that the greatest provenance one can get is him standing in front of the painting after he’s painted it and handing it to a buyer. Obviously that’s not possible most of the time, but I need to understand the provenance of a painting no matter how credible the gallery is. Anybody should ask for that. To this day, big-time collectors will see a huge painting on a fancy gallery wall they believe to be extremely valuable and buy it, no questions asked, because they want to have it right here and then. That’s a big mistake.

Whether you’re a seasoned collector or just starting out, unless you have seen the artist paint the piece in front of you or have visited their studio, you need to ask some serious questions. Get documentation tracing the ownership of the piece and its market value. Ask for a guarantee of authenticity, a condition report, a previous exhibition catalogue that displays the piece. Use art databases like Artnet or Artsy to see how often the artist’s work appears on the market and at what price. The reputation of the gallery or source selling it is also important—the Knoedler case notwithstanding.

There have been massive art scams in Toronto too—most recently the forgery of Norval Morrisseau paintings, described as “the biggest art fraud in history.” What has your investigation taught us about how fraud works on both sides of the border? Canada has not been immune to art forgery. There were rumours about the Morrisseau fakes dating back to the early 2000s, and yet nothing was truly pursued. That was not shocking to me. Indigenous art has been plagued by forgery and copyright theft for decades, and it’s plausible that there are more fraudulent pieces on the market than original works. Plus, I’m surprised we haven’t seen an even larger watershed of forgeries involving the Group of Seven artists. In 2023, the Vancouver Art Gallery discovered that 10 of their J. E. H. MacDonald sketches were actually fakes, and a potential Tom Thomson forgery was discovered in 2015. That one was questioned even after the piece was validated as authentic by A. J. Casson, a surviving Group of Seven artist. I’m sure there are hundreds more undiscovered fakes hanging in collectors’ houses and on museum walls. Where there is money and voracious art collectors, there is art fraud.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.